‘Encounter Party’ Breathes New Life Into ‘Dungeons & Dragons’

Encounter Party brings to life a fun and fast-paced game of Dungeons & Dragons with a unique approach to how it is packaged for the audience. Available on Plex & Freevee, the series takes us into a campaign that is all about the story and the characters, condensed to the best parts.

To help promote the series, I spoke with executive producer and Dungeon Master Brian David Judkins, as well as executive producer and cast member Ned Donovan, about the series and what made it so special for them both to be a part of it.

“Well, we’ve been sort of following this trend for a couple years now,” Judkins said. “It’s exciting for us because the television show is sort of the culmination of a long experiment. Back in 2018 I think is when I approached Ned about collaborating to do a show because we had seen this big uptick in this sort of communal thing and our goal was how can we expand on that? How can we sort of distill it down and refine it down into this hour long program that you see here? I think ultimately the answer is storytelling. Storytelling trumps everything. I’ve always said, you could make a film for two bucks and if it’s a good enough story, it’ll beat a blockbuster every time.”

Judkins went on to talk about the format of a show like Encounter Party and shows like it and why it works to make fans interested in the genre. “The format is very unique. I think people are getting excited about shows like Critical Role and Stranger Things really showed people this idea of you can take something that used to be sort of fun and let’s go on a crazy adventure. And if you really sort of bear down on drama and performance, that this is really sort of an improvisational setting that you can take to a really interesting extreme, which we’re hoping to people we can show with the television show.”

For Donovan, it was about bringing his love of D&D into the limelight in a way that he never managed to before. “For me, I’ve been playing this game since I was seven, and it was always like the thing I didn’t talk about,” he said. “I’ve played sports, I did theater, and I never talked about D&D and I watch a lot of live play, actual play productions. I listen to a lot of them. And when I make content, I never set out to be someone’s competition. I always wanna make a version of a show that no one’s done yet in my estimation. And I had always wanted to make a D&D show. I think D&D is some of the most fun storytelling you can have for an audience or just for yourselves at home. I’d never found the idea that justified making a show because it was always close to this or close to that. And I’d rather go watch their shows and support them than make a show competing with them.”

It took Judkins’ idea for Encounter Party to get him invested in the idea. “And when Brian approached me about Encounter Party with this kind of grand idea of we’re gonna capture the full game and then we’re going to use kind of the focus that we all have on story and edit the show down to remove the pieces that don’t help the audience experience to leave just this tight focused hour long episode. That was when I was like, oh, here’s the idea. Because I’d seen a lot of people be story focused and I’d seen a lot of people, but I’d never seen people actively take the time to make a show better by subtraction in this way. And this resonated with me and we set out to make the podcast and by the fourth day of our podcast release, we were near the top five of Apple’s new and noteworthy.”

You can see our full chat here:

Encounter Party is out now!

(featured image: eOne)